Blind Assassin (60 page)

One day Richard came home early. He seemed quite disturbed. Laura was no longer at Bella Vista, he said.

How could that be? I asked.

A man had arrived, he said. This man claimed to be Laura’s lawyer, or acting on her behalf. He was a trustee, he said—a trustee of Miss Chase’s trust fund. He’d challenged the authority by which she had been placed in Bella Vista. He had threatened legal action. Did I know anything about these proceedings?

No, I did not. (I kept my hands folded in my lap. I expressed surprise, and mild interest. I did not express glee.) And then what happened? I asked.

The director of Bella Vista had been absent, the staff had been confused. They had let her go, in custody of this man. They had judged that the family would wish to avoid undue publicity. (The lawyer had threatened some of this.)

Well, I said, I guess they did the right thing.

Yes, said Richard, no doubt; but was Lauracompos mentis? For her own good, for her ownsafety, we should at least determine that. Although on the surface of things she’d appeared calmer, the staff at Bella Vista had their doubts. Who knew what danger to herself or others she might pose if allowed to run around at large?

I didn’t happen by any chance to know where she was?

I did not.

I hadn’t heard from her?

I had not.

I wouldn’t hesitate to inform him, in that eventuality?

I would not hesitate. Those were my very words. It was a sentence without an object, and therefore not technically a lie.

I let a judicious amount of time go past, and then I set off to Port Ticonderoga, on the train, to consult Reenie. I invented a telephone call: Reenie was not in good health, I explained to Richard, and she wanted to see me again before something happened. I gave the impression that she was at death’s door. She’d appreciate a photograph of Aimee, I said; she’d want to have a chat about old times. It was the least I could do. After all, she’d practically brought us up. Brought me up, I corrected, to divert Richard’s attention away from the thought of Laura.

I arranged to see Reenie at Betty’s Luncheonette. (She had a telephone by then, she was holding her own in the world.) That would be best, she said. She was still working there, part-time, but we could meet after her hours were up. Betty’s had new owners, she said; the old owners wouldn’t have liked her sitting out front like a paying customer, even if she was paying, but the new ones had figured out that they needed all the paying customers they could get.

Betty’s had gone severely downhill. The striped awning was gone, the dark booths looked scratched and tawdry. The smell was no longer of fresh vanilla, but of rancid grease. I was overdressed, I realized. I shouldn’t have worn my white fox neckpiece. What had been the point of showing off, under the circumstances?

I didn’t like the look of Reenie: she was too puffy, too yellow, she was breathing a little too heavily. Perhaps she really wasn’t in good health: I wondered if I should ask. “Good to take the weight off my feet,” she said as she subsided into the booth across from me.

Myra—how old were you, Myra? You must have been three or four, I’ve lost count—Myra was with her. Her cheeks were red with excitement, her eyes were round and slightly bulged out, as if she were being gently strangled.

“I’ve told her all about you,” said Reenie fondly. “The both of you.” Myra wasn’t too interested in me, I have to say, but she was intrigued by the foxes around my neck. Children of that age usually like furry animals, even if dead.

“You’ve seen Laura,” I said, “or talked with her?”

“Least said, soonest mended,” said Reenie, glancing around her, as if even here the walls might have ears. I saw no need for such caution.

“I suppose it was you who organized the lawyer?” I said.

Reenie looked wise. “I did what was required,” she said. “Anyways, that lawyer was your mother’s second cousin’s husband, he was family in a way. So he saw the point of it, once I knew what was going on, that is.”

“How did you know?” I was savingwhat did you know for later.

“She wrote me,” said Reenie. “Said she wrote you, but never got an answer. She wasn’t allowed to be mailing any letters as such, but the cook helped her out. Laura sent her the money for it afterwards, and a little extra.”

“I didn’t get any letter,” I said.

“That’s what she figured. She figured they’d seen to that.”

I knew? who was meantby they. “I suppose she came here,” I said.

“Where else would she go?” said Reenie. “The poor creature. After all she’d been through.”

“What had she been through?” I very much wanted to know; at the same time I dreaded it. Laura could be fabricating, I told myself. Laura could be suffering from delusions. That couldn’t be ruled out.

Reenie had ruled it out, however: no matter what story Laura had told her, she’d believed it. I doubted that it was the same story I’d heard. I doubted especially that there had been a baby in it, in any shape or form. “There’s children present, so I won’t go into it,” she said. She nodded at Myra, who was gobbling up a slice of grisly pink cake and staring at me as if she wanted to lick me. “If I told you all of it you wouldn’t sleep at night. The only comfort is that you had no part in it. That’s what she said.”

“She said that?” I was relieved to hear it. Richard and Winifred had been cast as the monsters then, and I’d been excused—on the grounds of moral feebleness, no doubt. Though I could tell Reenie hadn’t entirely forgiven me for having been so careless as to let all of this happen. (Once Laura had gone off the bridge, she forgave me even less. In her view I must have had something to do with it. She was cool to me after that. She died begrudgingly.)

“She oughtn’t to have been put in such a place at all, a young girl like her,” said Reenie. “No matter what. Men walking around with their trousers undone, all kinds of goings-on. Shameful!”

“Will they bite?” said Myra, reaching for my foxes.

“Don’t touch that,” said Reenie. “With your sticky little fingers.”

“No,” I said. “They’re not real. See, they have glass eyes. They only bite their own tails.”

“She said, if only you’d known, you’d never have left her in there,” said Reenie. “Supposing you’d known. She said whatever else, you weren’t heartless.” She frowned sideways, at the glass of water. She had her doubts on that score. “Potatoes was what they ate there, mostly,” she said. “Mashed and boiled, she said. Skimped on the food, took the bread out of the mouths of the poor nutcases and loony birds in there. Lining their own pockets, is my guess.”

“Where has she gone? Where is she now?”

“That’s between you and me and the doorpost,” said Reenie. “She said it was better for you not to know.”

“Did she seem—was she…” Was she visibly crazy, I wanted to ask.

“She was the same as she always was: No more, no less. She wasn’t like a loony bird, if that’s what you mean,” said Reenie. “Thinner—she needs to get some meat back on her bones—and not so much talk about God. I only hope he stands by her now, for a change.”

“Thank you, Reenie, for all you’ve done,” I said.

“No need to thank me,” said Reenie stiffly. “I only did what was right.”

Meaning I hadn’t. “Can I write to her?” I was fumbling for my handkerchief. I felt like crying. I felt like a criminal.

“She said best not. But she wanted me to say she left you a message.”

“A message?”

“She left it before they took her off to that place. You’d know where to find it, she said.”

“Is that your own hankie? Have you got a cold?” said Myra, noting my snifflings with interest.

“If you ask too many questions your tongue will fall out,” said Reenie.

“No it won’t,” said Myra complacently. She began humming off-key, and kicking her fat legs against my knees, under the table. She had a cheerful confidence, it appeared, and was not easily frightened—qualities in her I’ve often found irritating, but have come to be grateful for. (Which may be news to you, Myra. Accept it as a compliment while you have the chance. They’re thin on the ground.)

“I thought you might like to see a picture of Aimee,” I said to Reenie. I had at least this one achievement I could show, to redeem myself in her eyes.

Reenie took the photo. “My, she’s a dark little thing, isn’t she?” she said. “You never know who a child will favour.”

“I want to see too,” said Myra, grabbing with her sugary paws.

“Quick then, and off we go. We’re late for your Dad.”

“No,” said Myra.

“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” Reenie sang, scrubbing pink icing off Myra’s little snout with a paper napkin.

“I want to stay here,” said Myra, but her coat was pulled on, her knitted wool hat was flumped down over her ears, and she was hauled sideways out of the booth.

“Take care of yourself,” said Reenie. She didn’t kiss me.

I wanted to throw my arms around her, and howl and howl. I wanted to be comforted. I wanted it to be me that was going with her.

“‘There’s no place like home,’” Laura said one day, when she was eleven or twelve. “Reenie sings that. I think it’s stupid.”

“How do you mean?” I said.

“Look.” She wrote it out as an equation. Noplace = home. Therefore, home = no place. Therefore home does not exist.

Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty’s Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn’t there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow.

I’m heartless, I thought. Therefore I’m homeless.

Yesterday I was too tired to do much more than lie on the sofa. As is becoming my no doubt slovenly habit, I watched a daytime talk show, the kind on which they spill the beans. It’s the fashion now, bean-spilling: people spill their own beans and also those of other people, they spill every bean they have and even some they don’t have. They do this out of guilt and anguish, and for their own pleasure, but mostly because they want to display themselves and other people want to watch them do it. I don’t exempt myself: I relish these grubby little sins, these squalid family tangles, these cherished traumas. I enjoy the expectation with which the top is wrenched off the can of worms as if from some amazing birthday present, and then the sense of anticlimax in the watching faces: the forced tears and skimpy, gloating pity, the cued and dutiful applause.Is that all there is? they must be thinking.Shouldn’t it be less ordinary, more sordid, more epic, more truly harrowing, this flesh wound of yours? Tell us more! Couldn’t we please crank up the pain?

I wonder which is preferable—to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you’re depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin—everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone—and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?

I carry no brief, for better or for worse.

Loose Lips Sink Ships, said the wartime poster. Of course the ships will all sink anyway, sooner or later.

After indulging myself in this way, I wandered into the kitchen, where I ate half of a blackening banana and two soda crackers. I wondered if something—food of some sort—had fallen down behind the garbage can—there was a meaty smell—but a quick check revealed nothing. Perhaps this odour was my own. I can’t overcome the notion that my body smells like cat food, despite whatever stagnant scent I sprayed on myself this morning—Tosca, was it, or Ma Griffe, or perhaps Je Reviens? I still have a few odds and ends of that sort kicking around. Grist for the green garbage bags, Myra, when you get around to them.

Richard used to give me perfume, when he felt I needed mollifying. Perfume, silk scarves, small jewelled pins in the shapes of domestic animals, of caged birds, of goldfish. Winifred’s tastes, not for herself but for me.

On the train coming back from Port Ticonderoga, and then for weeks afterwards, I pondered Laura’s message, the one Reenie said she’d left for me. She must have known, then, that whatever she was planning to say to the strange doctor at the hospital might have repercussions. She must have known it was a risk, and so she’d taken precautions. Somehow, somewhere, she’d left some word, some clue for me, like a dropped handkerchief or a trail of white stones in the woods.

I pictured her writing this message, in the way she always set about writing. No doubt it would be in pencil, a pencil with a chewed end. She often chewed her pencils; as a child her mouth had smelled of cedar, and if it was a coloured pencil her lips would be blue or green or purple. She wrote slowly; her script was childish, with round vowels and closed o’s, and long, wavery stems on her g’s and her y’s. The dots on the i’s and j’s were circular, placed far to the right, as if the dot were a small black balloon tethered to its stem by an invisible thread; the cross-strokes of the t’s were one-sided. I sat beside her in spirit, to see what she would do next.